Eve of Darkness : All About Romance

Eve of Darkness

Grade : C+

With a smart and very engaging heroine and interesting world-building, Eve of Darkness came very close to being a winning read for me. However, my frustrations with the men in Eve’s life and with having too many important questions either left unanswered or simply glossed over made this one that I cannot quite recommend.

Evangeline (Eve) Hollis has been given a divine punishment – the Mark of Cain. It would be nice to know exactly why this has happened, but while the reader gets a few theories, there’s no good answer. On the one hand, the author at times seems to be tying things into Eve losing her virginity to Alec Cain 10 years before. Then again, it might have something to do with Eve having sex in a stairwell with Alec’s brother, Reed Abel, almost immediately after meeting him. We do learn that the mark of Cain comes as divine punishment for sin – helpful information, but I could have used a little more elaboration.

The book opens six weeks after Eve has gotten her Mark. The opening chapter is actually quite good. Eve attends a football game, and thanks to her new Mark-enhanced powers, she can see the evil Infernals mixing among the humans, and the imagery is done very well. After Eve’s fight with a dragon in the stadium bathroom, things then jump back in time to the occasion where Eve got her Mark and then began to undergo training following her transformation. It’s a bit of a jolt at first, but I gradually found myself sinking into the story.

I’ll start with the more interesting parts of this book. First of all, Eve is a delightful heroine. I don’t always like everything she does or thinks, but I appreciate that she is actually thinking. She’s outspoken and deals with things head-on rather than wallowing in pity or acting curl-tossingly “feisty”. The author also spends a great deal of time developing Eve’s background, making her seem more three-dimensional than many characters. We learn that Eve is the child of an American father and Japanese mother and, since her mother makes frequent appearances in the story, readers get to see some of the family dynamic as well. I liked Eve’s mother as a character, and also enjoyed seeing the interactions between the two since it made Eve seem much more real.

The world-building has its interesting points, too. Alec and Reed are an obvious take on the biblical Cain and Abel, and the shape of their modern day feud is very imaginative, as well as contributing greatly to the sexual chemistry of the story. Eve’s status as a Mark gives her an enhanced sex drive (eyeroll), but she is also pulled between the two brothers, resulting in some interesting tension. Throw in a world where God is essentially head of a giant bureaucracy and angels are basically a cross between corporate managers and crime bosses bent on rooting out the evil Infernals, and you’ve got plenty to capture the imagination.

Unfortunately, things also have a tendency to fall apart as Eve gets deeper into her new life. The story is at its best during the action sequences because the reader gets caught up in the story. However, the kitchen sink approach to villains (nixes, dragons, gargoyles, etc.) gets a little confusing and tiresome. It can be hard to tell which Infernals fit in where and, since there seems to be no real reason for having so many different types of creatures, it annoyed rather than intrigued this reader. In addition, things sometimes seem to happen in the story for no real reason. At times, Eve has a mission and reason for acting, but on other occasions, the action just seems to come out of nowhere, giving the plotting a meandering feel. In addition, while the guys can be charming, Reed and Alec can also both be frustrating characters, and their treatment of Eve is often selfish. For this reason, I often found myself getting irritated during scenes involving these two.

While this book has enough positives that it made really want to like it, Eve of Darkness also has enough weak spots to make it a fraustrating read at times. I found the premise of the book intriguing and I may try the next in the series to see if it’s any better. However, this one just doesn’t quite pull it all together.

Reviewed by Lynn Spencer

Grade : C+

Book type : Urban Fantasy

Sensuality : Hot

Review Date : June 6, 2009

Published On : 2009/05

Lynn Spencer

I enjoy spending as much time as I can between the covers of a book, traveling through time and around the world. When I'm not having adventures with fictional characters, I'm an attorney in Virginia and I love just hanging out with my husband, little man, and the cat who rules our house.

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